Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 18, 2002
Melanie Hunter, CNSNews.com
Saturday, Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the Clinton administration that terrorists could hijack a plane and crash it into the Pentagon or another government building, the Associated Press reported Friday.

The report, titled "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?," cautioned that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network might seek revenge for the 1998 U.S. air strike on bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

An al-Qaeda-linked terrorist who was arrested in the Philippines in 1995 and then convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing suggested the suicide mission, the report noted. "Ramsi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters," author Rex Hudson wrote in a report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, which was shared with other federal agencies.

Bush administration officials have said no one in government had imagined an attack like Sept. 11 before it happened. "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The report was written by the Federal Research Division, an arm of the Library of Congress that provides research for federal agencies under contracts. It was based solely on open-source information that the federal researchers gathered about the likely threats of terrorists, according to Robert L. Worden, the division's chief of the federal research division.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/5/17/145830.shtml